Wired Magazine Officially Declares Second Life a "Ghost Site"

Wired's Frank Rose wrote an excellent article on how Second Life, Linden Labs' 3-D, avatar-driven world, became a black hole for Madison Avenue, gobbling up millions while providing nothing more than an empty stage for America's foremost brands. Rose writes correctly that the lemming-like march toward Second Life has its roots in desperation: Madison Avenue continually underestimates the skill required to conduct successful targeted advertising campaigns, remaining fixated on easy to fathom models such as that offered by Second Life, which replicates the billboard/trade show environment. The problem is that nobody's there: all those millions of dollars created a vast ghost world inhabited by nobody: the only thing missing are tumbleweeds spiraling past the Coca-Cola display.

Now all we need is someone to investigate MySpace and its Web 2.0 ilk and prove, using hard data, that it's a platform unsuitable for effective advertising.